“Down Is Up! And Up Is Down!” Joe Rogan’s Lament On Our Upside-Down Presidential Campaign

With two weeks to go until Election Day 2016, Joe Rogan remains nonplussed by the two major party choices for president of the United States.

Rogan, the UFC commentator, hit podcaster (“The Joe Rogan Experience”), former co-star of NewsRadio, host of Fear Factor, and co-host of The Man Show, suggests in his new stand-up special for Netflix, Joe Rogan: Triggered, that the key to happiness may be realizing that everyone is ultimately the same, just like you, only living different, alternate lives. Problem is, he’d like to smack half of the people he meets. Perhaps more during this election season.

“We’re like that close to President Trump,” Rogan jokes. Audience members boo, to which he replies: “You boo, but you won’t vote, you fucks! All those Bernie Sanders people were like, ‘Yo, Bernie’s the shit.’ Did you vote for him? ‘Voting ain’t real, bro. Doesn’t even work, dude.’”

He continues: “We are that close to President Trump. Bill Cosby is a rapist, and Bruce Jenner is a chick. We’re in an episode of Lost! Down is up and up is down! This is the type of world you get when you give kids participation trophies for getting their ass kicked in soccer games. This is the world we get. We get a Goddamned Nerf-ed up world filled with nonsense!”

He described the choice earlier in the campaign this way: “We got an old lady trying to get back at her husband for a blow job he got in the ’90s, we got an old man who hates money, and we got a reality TV star with a plastic set of hair.”

The special was taped earlier this year. Does Rogan still feel like we’re that close to actually electing Trump?

“It’s sliding more and more,” Rogan told me last week for my podcast. “I recorded that in June, and obviously he’s falling off, more and more every day, as more things get revealed. And I’m sure part of that is probably by design. But he’s the Republican representative. He’s really close. Whether he wins or not, he’s about as close as you can fucking get without winning. Scary shit!”

Though he’s also not a fan of Clinton, quickly adding: “And also, by the way, you can make a real argument that even though he’s fucking scary, Hillary is horribly corrupt. I mean, she just is. The more Wikileaks things that come out, that reveal all this pay-to-play shit that’s going on between her and the Clinton Foundation. And all of the emails that were deleted, and she tries to say they were about yoga classes and shit. She’s just a liar.”

He continued: “She’s a career politician who has a goal. And that goal is to become the first woman president. And she’s probably going to make it. And maybe that’s better than him winning. I don’t know.”

In his Netflix special, Rogan claimed he wishes Hillary Clinton wins, just so Americans can realize that the job of our president is a stupid, outdated role, regardless of whether it’s occupied by a man or a woman. “It’s a stupid job invented when people used to write with feathers,” Rogan jokes in the special, arguing that it made more sense when “there’s like 50 people” and no sense when we have 300 million residents to put one person in charge of us all.

Rogan told me last week that he figures Clinton is better for a few reasons. “I think it’s better for the culture. It’s better for the way that America is represented,” he said. “She’s way more eloquent. She’s way more reserved. The way she communicates is far more professional and presidential. But what she represents is politics and usual.”

Trump represents blowing up the system (if not also the world).

But as Rogan jokes in his Netflix special, he wishes we had more, better alternatives on the presidential ballot: “We’re down to assholes! Where’s Elon Musk when you need him? Where are the geniuses?”

There is nothing more highly charged in our culture quite like having an opinion on politics. Each side so fully imbibed with Team Spirit.